101 pages • 3 hours read
Herman MelvilleMoby Dick
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1851A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The White Whale
In a novel swarming with symbols, many of which the narrator recognizes and expounds upon, the most prominent is the novel’s titular whale, Moby Dick. To Ishmael, the whiteness of the whale represents the most terrifying aspects of metaphysical reality, the great unknown beyond what can be merely registered with the senses. To Starbuck, the whale represents the natural anarchy that ruins good fortune and good commerce. It is Ahab’s perception, however, that drives the story. To Ahab, the whale is the summation of a life when viewed in hindsight, with an emphasis on the natural corruption that leads to loss of vigor and mobility. It was Moby Dick that took Ahab’s leg, and time that made his hair grey; Ahab seems to blame the whale for both things. The whale also represents a related failure of a life’s work, a life spent whaling with only a small share of physical capital to show for it. Ahab’s is a world deserted of spiritual and social pleasure, a morbid world in which only the physical self exists in its slow and inexorable deterioration. Killing Moby Dick would put a punctuation to that life, ending it with meaning and self-direction. It is in this sense that the hunt for the whale is also fundamentally suicidal.
The Ocean
Very little time is spent on land in Moby Dick. The limits of Ishmael’s physical world are therefore the small and cramped confines of the Pequod, which he describes in the same detail that a neurosurgeon would describe the parts of the brain. Yet Ishmael matches and measures his imagination against the oceans of Earth. Romantic poets of Melville’s era sometimes spoke of “the pathetic fallacy” in which human emotions are interposed over nature, such that an angry person sees thunderheads in the sky (sometimes where there are none). Melville takes pains to reverse this formula. The weather influences the people on the Pequod, never the other way around. When Ahab chooses to head his ship directly into a storm, away from good hunting grounds and towards Moby Dick, he is explicitly acting like a fool. It is his altered consciousness and lack of respect for the ocean that destroys his compass, not the wind itself. Likewise, when the weather is good, as in “The Gilder” chapter, Ahab is nearly convinced that life is worth living, and momentarily finds the connection with Starbuck that he would need to keep living. The ocean is Moby Dick’s partner and reflection.
Pseudoscience
“And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray,” says Ishmael as he considers, for an entire chapter, the not-entirely-scientific question of whether the whale’s spout is made of water or vapor (409). A large part of Ishmael’s personality is his curiosity which takes him on a journey through the history of whaling and the minutest part of the anatomy of the whale. All of this rests only partly on peer-reviewed evidence. This is a mixed blessing, particularly in an era in which scientific reason was not a universal value. After all, in relying on hearsay, innuendo, hard study, and, as above, intuition, Ishmael gets as much right as he gets wrong. He rightly ridicules the pseudoscientific fashion for the measuring of people’s heads to determine their character (which was a theory given much credence at the time). He notes the potential environmental depletion of both whales and buffalo. He correctly identifies much of the purpose of the whale’s warm-blooded mammalian anatomy in such a way that his declaration that the whale is a fish should perhaps be taken ironically. What is scientifically true and provable is not a matter of individual relativism. Nevertheless, Ishmael teaches us that science ignores commonly gathered knowledge and the influence of culture at its own peril, since culture and stories ground us in ways that are meaningful though hard to quantify.
Related Titles
By Herman Melville
